Tracking Visitors on your Website

Business owners realize that having a website is beneficial for marketing, but wouldn’t it also be valuable to know exactly who is visiting your website? If you build a website and it looks first-rate but potential customers/clients don’t visit it, what value is there? None. You’ve spent resources on a website that doesn’t benefit the business. This month I want to provide information on some common industry standard technologies that are being used today to track visitors.

When you have a website it sits on a web server. Part of the web server’s job is to track every transaction that occurs when someone visits your website. For example, the web server identifies what address someone is coming from and what pages they are requesting on your server. From this information, it is possible to gather different reports on visitors to your website. You can track how many unique visitors come to your site during the week/month, and what was the most common page on your site that they viewed. Take a retail store for example. This would be comparable to how many people are coming to the store, and what products people are looking at most.

As you can imagine this can be a very powerful & valuable marketing tool. For example, a plumbing company sends out flyers to 1500 businesses in Winnipeg. On that flyer they put their website address as well as a certain page offering a promotion (www.reallygreatplumbing.com/flyerdeals). When people receive the flyers and visit the web site page, the plumbing company can track these visits in their reports and can verify if people are actually reading the flyers. This allows the company to determine whether or not the flyers were a very successful & worthwhile marketing tool.

There are some common ways of tracking visitors to your website. Normally your web hosting provider will have a built in tool that you can access. Another tool that is very powerful is Google Analytics. It is a free tool provided by Google and has some very powerful features. An example illustrated below demonstrates a chart of visits for a one month period.

Google Analytics Chart

Wes Render
Otherdata Networks Corp